Instead of spending the night at the seedy border crossing (into Thailand) of Poipet, I went to Battambong, which was rumored to be a beautiful river town along the way. To my surprise, as I arrived around 5pm, the entire town was closing shop. The women in the markets were packing up their produce, shops were locking up, and traffic nearly ceased to exist when the sun went down.
Luckily, I had a few hours during the daytime to rent a tuktuk and explore the countryside. What I saw was a slice of Cambodian life that I hadn’t been able to see or appreciate in any of the larger cities: families producing rice noodles, women making delicious sticky rice in bamboo, and of course, the Cambodian delicacy: the rotten fish market. I spent the day taste testing my way through the villages…until I arrived at the rotten fish market, at which point I went home to get ready for Thailand.